Max said something to the sentry in German, a command, and then turned and bowed stiffly to her. “Goodnight, Mademoiselle de Courcelles.”
He turned, but not toward the keep. Away, back toward the bare hill and the sleeping village, where no church bells rang.
“Wait,” said Aurélie, knowing it was weakness to prolong their parting. “Where are you going?”
He seemed very remote, and very German, in his big greatcoat and uniform cap. “To deliver your packages.”
Aurélie bit her lip, remembering the basket, abandoned by the bench. Her duty, forgotten. “I thought Father Christmas had come already.”
Max looked at her steadily. “These children deserve all the joy they can get, in small packages or large. And how could I not—after you risked so much?”
She thought of those pitiful little packets of nuts, scattered when the basket had fallen in the heat of their kiss. “So much for so little, you mean.”
“It isn’t little, to care.” Max’s eyes were very bright in the moonlight. He doffed his cap to her, the torchlight glinting off his silver-gilt hair. “Joyeux Noël, Mademoiselle de Courcelles.”
Avoiding the eyes of the sentry, Aurélie began walking rapidly across the courtyard, back toward the new wing. No, it wasn’t so little, to care. Not at all. And that was what scared her.
There was a hollow place where Max von Sternburg had been. Aurélie hadn’t realized how much time she spent with him, how much she relied upon his company, until he wasn’t there anymore. January shivered into February, cold, bitter cold, her ears numb to the sound of distant shelling, her hands perpetually covered with chilblains. The coal had been diverted to Germany, the trees in the forest felled to make planks to line trenches. The walls of the castle had never seemed so gray, or the world so bare.
It might have been better had she had an occupation, if there were fields to till or crops to harvest, but this was the quiet time of year, when the ground was frozen hard. If there had been wool, she might have spun—if one of the women had taught her. There was mending to do, always, but Suzanne was a far better hand with a needle than she. Hoffmeister hadn’t thought to forbid her the books in the library, so she read, puzzling over difficult words, wishing she had applied herself more to her studies, trying to avoid the suspicion that she was striving, in some strange way, to impress Max von Sternburg, even though she went out of her way to avoid him and he her.
She tried to find her father, but he, too, proved remarkably elusive. That he was engaged on some grand project, she had no doubt. That he didn’t trust her enough to include her, she also knew, and it stung. He was protecting her, she told herself, but she didn’t really believe it, not entirely.
In the end, Aurélie took refuge in the chapel, going on her knees on the worn old stones engraved with the names of long-dead Courcelles. She tried to pray, but her thoughts remained stubbornly of the earth. In her strange, solitary childhood, she had come to the chapel frequently. She would evade her governess and sit on the floor beside the effigy of the first countess, absently stroking the carved fur of the lady’s lapdog as she poured out all her thoughts and concerns to her ancestress. Aurélie had never thought herself fanciful, but sometimes she imagined she could see the lady herself, standing there insubstantial in the shade, smiling down at her in the warm silence.
But that had been summer, always summer, when the air was sweet with the scent of roses and jewel-toned light fell through the old stained-glass windows, dappling everything with color. Try though she might, Aurélie could find no sense of presence here now, either human or divine. Where was the Lord, to have visited such horrors upon them? The children of the village grew wasted, frail. Where were her ancestors, as Germans reveled in their keep, shaming their shades? Where was her father, keeping her in ignorance when she burned to do something, anything?
She felt lost, deserted by everyone on whom she had relied.
Everyone except the one person she had the least reason to trust.
Love. It was absurd to think of love at a time like this. She shouldn’t be thinking it. It made her chest hurt and her head ache.
“It was a Tuesday in May,” he had said, sounding sure, so sure. No wild declarations of passion, just that calm certainty.
So sure in his love for her.
For her.
Jean-Marie loved her, Aurélie knew, but he loved her because it was expected. He loved her because their families had known each other for generations. He loved her because it was less bother than finding a wife for himself.
But Max had no obligations to her, no ties of family or history. If he loved her—Aurélie made sure to stress that if—it was purely because of some quality in her. Because there was something about her that called to him. Or something he thought called to him.
She had to keep telling herself that, because if she were to allow herself to believe that he saw her, truly saw her, as he had seen her in the corner of her mother’s salon, away from the throng, impatient with their philosophies, and still loved her anyway—that was heady and dangerous stuff, and she shouldn’t be allowing herself to consider even the possibility of it, not with a German, not when she was all but promised, never mind that she’d never felt any more passion for Jean-Marie than he felt for her.
Certainly nothing like the passion she’d felt on Christmas Eve, in the churchyard, with Max von Sternburg.
Aurélie rested her forehead against the cold stone of the countess’s pet dog, praying for clarity, for a sign, for anything.
The cold wind whistled through the cracks in the windows. And then Aurélie heard a noise that wasn’t the wind at all.
She froze against the stone, her body chilled and alert at the same time.
There was a flutter and a cooing noise. Slowly, Aurélie lifted her head—to see a white pigeon perched on the breastplate of Sigismund the First.
For a moment, all disbelief fled. Here was fairy tale, indeed. A sign from her ancestors. A dove bearing—a metal canister?
Sense returned with a vengeance. This wasn’t a metaphor or a message. Not that sort of message, in any event. This was a carrier pigeon, banned on pain of death, bearing intelligence, and if Hoffmeister found it here, they’d all pay for it.
“Hello,” said Aurélie to the pigeon. “If I may?”
The pigeon submitted to having its cylinder removed. Inside was a tiny scrap of foolscap, rolled into a scroll thinner than a knitting needle. Aurélie was just about unroll it when a shadow fell across the nave.
Hastily, Aurélie placed herself between the intruder and the pigeon, as though that would make any difference.
“Father! Thank goodness,” she said. “I thought—”
“The German dogs would never come in here,” said her father dismissively. He wasn’t, Aurélie noticed, as well groomed as usual. His valet had gone for a soldier back in August, and Victor, while enthusiastic, was hardly skilled. There were nicks on her father’s chin, clumsily covered with sticking plaster. But his manner was as imperious as ever. He held out a hand. “I believe that message is intended for me.”
Aurélie didn’t surrender it. “You should be more careful. What if someone else had found it?”